English(3)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide      English(3)



NAME
       English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctu-
       ation variables

SYNOPSIS
           use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;  # Avoids regex performance penalty
           use English;
           ...
           if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }

DESCRIPTION
       This module provides aliases for the built-in variables
       whose names no one seems to like to read.  Variables with
       side-effects which get triggered just by accessing them
       (like $0) will still be affected.

       For those variables that have an awk version, both long
       and short English alternatives are provided.  For example,
       the $/ variable can be referred to either $RS or
       $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the English mod-
       ule.

       See perlvar for a complete list of these.

PERFORMANCE
       This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regu-
       lar expressions, due to unfortunate implementation
       details.  If performance matters in your application and
       you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or $POSTMATCH, try doing

          use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;

       .  It is especially important to do this in modules to
       avoid penalizing all applications which use them.



perl v5.8.8                 2001-09-21                 English(3)